Art by Jesse Farrell

Main menu

Monthly Archives: July 2012

Another oldie.
I enjoyed BATMAN BEYOND, but never loved Terry McGinniss as a character. I liked the “Dirty Harry teamed with Spider-Man” dynamic Old Bruce and Terry shared, but Terry was never more than adequate. I once complained to a friend that Terry had none of Batman’s detective skills, that other than a gung-ho attitude he had little that wasn’t provided by the powered armor he wore. “That’s because Bruce isn’t training a replacement,” my friend said, “Terry is his arm.”

Another piece done for the English charity Childline. I asked for and obtained permission from League of Extraordinary Gentlemen creators Alan Moore and Kevin O’Neil. Getting their imprimatur was a exciting in and of itself.

The initial premise of LoEG was that various characters of fantastic Victorian literature were recruited by Great Britain to become a kind of 1890s superhero team. As the series continued, Moore and O’Neill broadened the concept by including an ever-increasingly number of literary and pop culture characters, suggesting a world in which all fictions are real and coexist. Almost no walk-on or background character, location, or sign is included without referring back to another work of some kind (Jess Nevins has done a phenomenal job of annotating LoEG) . In that spirit I wanted to make sure that all the details of this piece carried a little bit of narrative in them.

The scene depicted is from the second volume of LoEG, as Mr. Hyde is saying goodbye to Mina Murray, heroine of Dracula, before he confronts the Martians from War of the Worlds. Later in the story they mention a memorial statue will be built, and Serpentine Park will be renamed in honor of Mr. Hyde. I was trying to fit this into the narrative, suggesting this was the memorial statue (Ade Brown, the organizer of the charity auction, proposed the statue would have been sculpted by Mark Gatiss’s character Lucifer Box, and so Box’s signature is visible along with a date of 1900, two years after the events of the book).

Wanting to include the rest of the League, I placed them in simulated-stone cameos around the base of the statue, Quatermain, Nemo, and the Invisible Man, Hawley Griffin, with their adversaries the Martians included in the fourth cameo. Along the “stone” base are reliefs of the Nautilus famous Martian walkers along the Thames, the League “mystery man” logo, a depiction of Mars ringed with red creeper vines, and the League’s handler, Campion Bond with his family’s motto. Numerous other, minor details are packed away in there, too. The finished piece was shipped to London where it sat in the window of the defunct Comics Showcase, a shop I’m told Kevin O’Neill frequented, until it was auctioned.

When O’Neill drew the scene I used as a the basis of the sculpture, he drew Mina and Hyde mostly in close-up, so I needed to guess at their relative positions and postures. I gave Mina ramrod-straight Victorian posture, her hands bunched into fists at her sides. The most recent issue of League of Extraordinary Gentlemen Vol. 3: Century 2009 included this picture of the (now immortal) Mina Murray:

I thought it was funny that O’Neill had given Mina the same posture I had…

And then I noticed the monogram on her hooded sweatshirt. It’s a stylized “JF” nearly identical to the one I use to sign my sculptures.

I’m going to chalk it up to a neat coincidence and not the most obscure allusion ever made in LoEG, but I would love to imagine I’d been born into a world of stories and become one myself.

This life-sized replica of the mask worn by X-Man Xorn was a Secret Santa gift for an X-Men fan. To keep it under the $20 price-cap on this gift exchange, this mask was made entirely from things I already had around the house, primarily modeling clay and found objects, cast in cheap, brush-on liquid latex meant for securing carpeting to the floor, and cast in left0ver Smooth-On resin.

This piece is about 10″ high, a mixture of Super Sculpey, Sculpey III, and Sculpey Firm over and aluminum and brass armature, based on a design by Sean Downey. The mixture of Super Sculpey and Sculpey firm give me a texture I prefer to work with, particularly in the hot weather when polymer clay gets a little gummier.